Flow of Donations from Network Fundraising and More

Photo by Rich Anderson

Roger Carr at the Everyday Giving Blog  responded to my reflections about networked fundraising, particularly my concern about donor fatique and potentially annoying blog readers here when I'm raising money for the Sharing Foundation.  The question is "when is enough enough? (in terms of solicitation for personal fundraising campaigns on your blog"   Roger says:

• Should you care if a person stops reading your blog for this reason? What is the purpose of your blog? If it is to have the largest number of readers then I guess you should care. If it is to attract a reader you can inspire and engage with, don't worry about the loss. That person obviously doesn't share your same values.
• You need to stay true to the purpose of your blog. This is the one exception to the rest of this list. It will be easier to ask many times if your site is focused on the topic of philanthropy or related to the mission of the charity you are raising funds to support. If you maintain a blog about bike repair and continue to ask for donations to support a team of doctors helping in other countries, you will probably alienate your readers pretty fast.

My thought was to blog about the cause (a stretch), but to share as much learning about personal/social fundraising or what I'm learning about social networks - that should be of interest some readers - and even those I'm competing with for the contest.

Alison Fine wrote a reflection about what we need to learn from networked activities in response to my NTEN article and our subsequent email conversation.   Gayle Roberts made the point, "tags about the links between people are equally if not more valuable than tags about people."   She also pointed to FAS research company that does social network analysis and their gallery of visualizations.

This made me think of the pyramid of peace visualizations that Nancy White surfaced on her blog illustrating the flow of donations from networked fundraising.  Would be interesting to see something like this from the Frozen Pea Fund. (case study here, here and here).  I captured data about the flow of donations from my twitter campaign in October in spreadsheet, but wasn't sure how to diagram it.   This gives me some inspiration.

I'm also taking this opportunity to remind anyone who wanted to donate to the Sharing Foundation:

• If you haven't already, donate $10 or more to the Sharing Foundation through Global Giving Fundraiser set up by Blogger Michele Martin of the Bamboo project!
• If we are four of the top causes to get the most unique donors, we'll win $50,000 for the Sharing Foundation as part of America's Giving Challenge. With $10 and 10 minutes of your time you can help improve the lives of over 1,500 children in one of the world's poorest countries.

Comments

[Roger Carr]

Visualizations are important to get the point across to others about the potential power of using online networks. However, the information that is available to support these visualizations can be very difficult to come by (at least accurate information).

For example, we may know who donated to a fundraising campaign, but what person(s) and networking site(s) got them there? Visitors to a blog site only represents a portion of the readers because posts are syndicated to several network sites, news sites and individual subscribers.

I believe we can show the power of online networking through the overall impact. I am not sure it is possible to accurately represent exactly how the impact occurred when many of the sites and distribution of our content is now beyond our control...but I guess that is the challenge.

[Gayle Roberts]

Thanks for the shout out Beth.

Just want to clarify, I was quoting my friend Neal Gorenflo, VP at FAS Research, about the importance of tagging relationship links. I'm not smart enough to have come up with that on my own :-)

Peace,
Gayle

[Ana Jahannes]

I think you should also lead a blog by example. So whenever you yourself are donating to a cause, or whenever someone is, it should be noted. I'm much more inclined to give when I see that others are too. Also emphasizing that it's not how much that counts. Often people who are considering giving don't have all that much money. So donating a dollar is always gonna be better than no dollars.